SCADA systems monitor and control dispersed assets involved in industrial, infrastructure, or facility-based processes. SCADA systems are used to monitor and control industrial processes such as manufacturing, production, power generation, fabrication, refining, and the like. Many public and private infrastructures rely on SCADA systems for monitoring and controlling processes such as water treatment and distribution, wastewater collection and treatment, oil distribution, natural gas distribution, electric power transmission and distribution, and the like. Facilities such as buildings, airport, ships, space stations, private homes, communities, and the like also sometime rely on SCADA systems to monitor and control security access, energy consumption, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, for example.
SCADA systems typically include a control center. SCADA control centers include a human machine interface (HMI) by which a human operator can observe process data and provide input for remote control of a process if necessary, databases for storing historical process data, servers for communicating via communication routers with field deployments of SCADA devices, such as remote telemetry units (RTUs).
The RTUs connect to physical equipment such as meters, sensors, switches, valves, probes, and the like. RTUs convert electrical signals from the physical equipment to digital values such as to identify the open/closed status from a switch or a valve, and conduct measurements such as of pressure, flow, voltage, or current.